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Roundtable Vol X, No. 18 (2009) 2009 h-diplo H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables Volume X, No. 18 (2009) 4 June 2009 Jeffrey A. Engel, ed. The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008. 544 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13006-4. Roundtable Editors: Yafeng Xia and Diane Labrosse Roundtable Web Editor: George Fujii Introduction by: Yafeng Xia, Long Island University Reviewers: Adam Cathcart, Pacific Lutheran University Ting Ni, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota Priscilla Roberts, University of Hong Kong Guoqiang Zheng, Angelo State University Stable URL: http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/PDF/Roundtable-X-18.pdf Contents Introduction by Yafeng Xia, Long Island University .................................................................. 2 Review by Adam Cathcart, Pacific Lutheran University ............................................................ 6 Review by Ting Ni, Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota ...................................................... 10 Review by Priscilla Roberts, The University of Hong Kong ..................................................... 13 Review by Guoqiang Zheng, Angelo State University ............................................................. 28 Author’s Response by Jeffrey A. Engel, Texas A&M University .............................................. 31 Copyright © 2009 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for non-profit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author(s), web location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses, contact the H-Diplo editorial staff at [email protected]. H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. X, No 18 (2009) Introduction by Yafeng Xia, Long Island University oon after President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in February 1972, there was a lull in Sino-American relations. Nixon’s initial opening of China was followed by a period in S which the projected normalization of diplomatic ties between the two powers was allowed to languish. An important precondition for a better U.S.-China relationship was Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s belief that the U.S.-Soviet differences were much greater than their ability to compromise and conspire against China. Mao was contemplating an alliance with the United States to counter the Soviet Union. However, Nixon’s visit to the Soviet Union in May 1972, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhenev’s return visit to the United States in June 1973, and the signing of several treaties greatly improved U.S.-Soviet relations. Mao was disappointed and annoyed. During his sixth visit to China in November 1973, in a hastily arranged meeting on the evening of the 13th, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger discussed possible Sino-U.S. military cooperation with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. He suggested that the United States and China sign an agreement on accidental nuclear war and also establish a hotline. When Zhou’s interpreter Tang Wensheng and Wang Hairong, then assistant foreign minister, reported to Mao that Zhou was too weak and incompetent in his talk with Kissinger, Mao assumed that Zhou had departed from the correct position, and had accepted U.S. nuclear protection in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack on China. On Mao’s order, several sessions of enlarged Politburo meetings were held to denounce Zhou from 21 November to 5 December. The purpose was to expose and criticize the so-called “Right Capitulationism” that prevailed while Zhou had presided over diplomacy toward the United States in the last several years. After such events, it is not difficult to predict that China’s perception and attitude toward the United States became more rigid. When Mao did not see the expected intensification of the Soviet-American conflict, he flip- flopped on his anti-American approach, which his theory of “three worlds” attempted to rationalize. In his speech at the sixth special conference of the UN on 10 April 1974, Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping elaborated Mao’s theory of “three worlds” and China’s foreign policy. The hub of Mao’s new theory was no longer “an alliance with the United States to counter the Soviet Union.” Nor was there a reappearance of those world revolutionary propositions such as “anti-imperialists and anti-revisionists,” or “down with the imperialists, revisionists and reactionaries.” The core of the new theory was to ally with various nations against the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent, against the United States. Mao modified his strategy from a united front with the United States to a united front against both the United States and the Soviet Union. China was to rely neither on the United States, nor the developed countries in Europe or Japan, nor any revolutionary parties of the world, but mainly on the governments of the developing countries in the third world. When George Bush arrived in China as the head of the United States Liaison Office in October 1974, Mao was in the last leg of his life and was formulating his succession plan. Early in 1973, Zhou Enlai had been diagnosed with fatal bladder cancer and was now dying H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. X, No 18 (2009) in his hospital bed. After Deng jumped on the bandwagon at the Politburo meeting, criticizing Zhou in November/December 1973, he won Mao’s trust. Mao regarded his wife Jiang Qing, and her Shanghai henchmen (the so-called Gang of Four) as his true ideological heirs. But Mao was also aware that his radical supporters were not experienced in running the country. Mao decided to entrust Deng with more power and Deng was soon put in charge of foreign affairs, especially policy toward the United States. Deng was appointed first vice premier and put in charge of the day-to-day government work in November 1974. But Deng was constantly ambushed by the “Gang of Four,” who regarded him as the main obstacle to their road to the supreme power. During this period, Deng was very much of a caretaker as far as China’s policy toward the United States was concerned. He couldn’t exceed the stipulations of Mao’s theory. While in Beijing, Bush complained about his isolation and little contact with Chinese officials. He recorded on 6 July 1975, “The people are so nice here but they can be so obtuse, they can be so removed – so little chance for contacts….I can sit formally for one hour with Wang Hairong who says absolutely nothing.” (353) Had Bush known more about China’s elite politics, he would not have been so disappointed that he was not able to engage in any substantive dialogue with any Chinese official. President Gerald Ford was more cautious in handling Sino-American relations. The United States and China made an effort to maintain their relations at a strategic level. Kissinger kept making his bi-annual trips to Beijing. For the U.S. side, the domestic political cost was too high for normalization with the People’s Republic of China. Neither Kissinger nor Ford was willing to take the risk of breaking with Taiwan without a guarantee that Beijing would not conquer that island by force. George Bush was among those who warned Ford not to move ahead too precipitously in breaking relations with Taiwan. In October 1975, during Kissinger’s advance trip to China to make arrangements for President Ford’s visit to Beijing, Deng Xiaoping “delivered a blistering and contemptuous review of the Ford-Kissinger policy.”1 Deng’s tough attitude was in reality directed to shoring up and protecting his own declining status in the elite political struggle. Ford’s visit in December proved disappointing. The trip was cut from seven days to four, and Ford added stops in Indonesia and the Philippines to give his tour greater substance. Although the Americans wanted to issue a joint statement at the end of the meeting to give the impression of headway, the Chinese refused on the grounds that no concrete progress toward normalization had been made.2 Regretfully, these important meetings were not recorded in Bush’s China Diary. Immediately after Ford’s visit, to show China’s dissatisfaction with the status of Sino-American relations and the alleged U.S. appeasement of the Soviet Union, the Chinese government announced the release of three crew members 1 Patrick Tyler, A Great Wall, Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), 187, 206-207. 2 See Harry Harding, A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China since 1972 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1992), 48. H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews, Vol. X, No 18 (2009) of a Soviet helicopter that had penetrated Chinese airspace in March 1974.3 When Bush departed China in December 1975, Sino-American relations were at their nadir. The China Diary of George H. W. Bush: The Making of a Global President, skillfully edited by Jeffrey Engel, offers rare insights for both scholars and the general public. The book provides an understanding of George Bush’s subsequent foreign policy through his pre- presidential experiences in China. It is an important source of information for the study of Sino-American relations in the 1970s. To assess the significance of the volume, H-Diplo invited four scholars to comment on it. Their reviews are published here, along with a reply from Jeffrey Engel. Participants Jeffrey A. Engel teaches history and public policy at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government, where he directs the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs and is Evelyn and Ed F. Kruse '49 Faculty Fellow. He is author of Cold War at 30,000 Feet: the Anglo- American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Harvard, 2007), which was awarded the 2009 Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association. He is also editor of Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Stanford, 2008) and The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (Oxford, 2009).
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